KAT
I WISH MEG WOULD TEXT ME, JUST ONCE, TO LET ME KNOW SHE’S OKAY. But of course, I don’t really want her to text me, because she’s on a plane and it’s possible cell phones really do interfere with the plane’s instruments, and when you’re defying gravity and sitting in a heap of metal thousands of feet above the earth, there are some things you don’t take chances on.
“Are you practicing to be in the Queen’s Guard?” Granddad’s question floats through the kitchen door behind me.
Then Mom’s: “Shouldn’t you be in school? I thought you didn’t get out until two on early-dismissal days.”
I’ve been standing, frozen, at the kitchen table, one hand resting on my math textbook, the other clenching my message-less phone, for I’m not sure how long. Five minutes? Ten?
I turn around. Mom and Granddad stare at me from the kitchen door. I didn’t even hear them come in. I swear Granddad used to be taller than Mom, but hunched over his cane, he’s more than a foot shorter. Behind him, Mom holds out one arm as if ready to catch him if he falls.
“English teacher didn’t show up for class,” I explain. “So I came home.”
Last time that happened, in Ontario, I sat in the empty classroom for the entire period, working on my homework and worrying about whether the teacher was in a car accident or had a heart attack or hit her head and was wandering around somewhere with amnesia. This time, I just got up and left with everyone else.
Granddad shuffles into the room. He has managed to get movement back in his left leg after the stroke, but the foot still drags a little, like it’s full of rocks nobody’s thought to remove.
“Well, that’s great,” Mom says. “You can watch your granddad while I go out and run a few errands.”
“I don’t need a babysitter,” he says as he inches across the room.
“I know, Dad. That’s not what I meant.” She picks up a huge stack of papers—a textbook proof, probably—from the kitchen counter. “I’ll be home in time for supper. Pizza okay?”
I nod, and Granddad just grunts, and then she’s gone.
Despite his foot full of rocks, Granddad has made it over to the kitchen table. He pulls out a chair and lowers himself into it. He sets his hands on the table, causing his bony shoulders to rise up as if his saggy-skinned turtle neck is receding back into its turtle shell.
“So, why the long face?” he asks.
“I don’t—”
“You look worried. Is it school? Math test? Boys?” He says all three with a straight face, though his eyes do twinkle just a little at the last one.
I unclench my fingers and set my phone down on the table. “It’s Meg, I guess.” I can’t think of any reason not to tell him.
“Your short, chatty friend?” he asks, as if I have oodles of friends over all the time and he can’t keep them straight, though of course, he knows exactly who she is. “She has spunk. I like her.”
I nod. Clench, then unclench my fists again.
“So, what’s the problem?” Granddad asks.
Where do I even start? How do I explain why it worries me that the science project made her so manic about school that she actually started passing? Or that she still hasn’t told me why she and Grayson broke up? Or that she hasn’t spoken to her ex-stepdad for months but went on a trip with him anyways? Or that sometimes, when she talks about dating LumberLegs, I think she might not be joking?
“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s like—it’s like she’s standing on the edge of a cliff, ready to leap and soar and show off her bright, feathery wings. Except she doesn’t have wings. She just has arms. And I can’t tell her that. How am I supposed to tell her she doesn’t have wings?”
Granddad nods his turtle head, as if my rambling actually makes sense. “But if you don’t tell her . . .”
“She plummets to her death.” I sigh and pull out a chair, leaning on the seat with one knee.
Granddad’s forehead creases. “This is just a metaphor, right? Meg’s not actually leaping? Or dying?”
“Right.”
“Great. I love metaphors.”
I straighten my phone and my textbook so they’re perfectly aligned. “So, what should I do?”
He taps the fingers of his good hand on the table. “Well, you’re going to have to tell her. About the wings, don’t you think? Or maybe not even about the wings. Just whatever she needs to hear to keep from jumping.”
I settle fully into the chair, slumping against its hard back. “That’s the problem. I think she already jumped.”
Granddad massages his deadened left hand with his right one. I wonder, if I took his left hand between my own, would he feel it? He says it’s getting better, but I’m not sure what that means. He looks up at me, straight on, his blue eyes shining.
“Well, then—can you catch her?”
Up in my room, I lean against the icy window, staring blankly out at the straggling piles of snow that just won’t go away. Granddad’s words echo in my ears, and ideas flutter through my head before realizing that they, too, lack wings and can only plummet and die.
Meg is the ideas person. The brainstormer. She is cantaloupe thrown from roofs and speed runs for science. I am questionnaires and control factors.
Maybe I can buy her a nice card. Or bake a cake. Maybe a sleepover when she gets back late Sunday night, even though it’ll be a school night?
I wander over to my bed and settle onto it. Pick up Meg’s purple button—the one from the hospital—off my nightstand and twirl it between my fingers. Run my thumb over its waxy smoothness. Clutch it tightly in my fist, the way I did when Meg shoved me through that hospital door. When I walked through that hospital door.
I bolt to my feet and down the stairs. “Granddad!” I shout. “Granddad!”
I know what I have to do.
CHAPTER 23
MEG
BY THE TIME OUR PLANE LANDS, MY BRAIN LITERALLY HURTS FROM concentrating on not talking, so when our hotel shuttle arrives at the airport, I climb into the front seat and start chatting with the shuttle driver. He has a heavy accent and I only understand about half of what he says—something about his son or maybe the sun or maybe he got shunned and that’s why he moved here—but he listens while I tell him that this was my first time flying and the plane was smaller than I expected—no middle row like you see in the movies—and those recliner seats really don’t recline much, and they asked me to choose between cookies and pretzels, but apparently I stumbled upon a magical secret, because when I said I wanted both, I got both.
When we arrive at the hotel, I’ve gotten it all out of my system, and I manage to return to stony silence while Stephen-the-Leaver checks us in, then carries our luggage up to our rooms. When he suggests the hotel restaurant for supper, I just shrug.